The minute Stormy Daniels and her team walked into the Vanity Fair offices on a warm day in September, they were strategizing ways to get out. The paparazzi had followed them down from The View, where Daniels had just announced her book, Full Disclosure, and they would wait as long as it took for a shot of the porn star, director, and professional needler of the president of the United States.

The two women joining Daniels for this interview were not paparazzi targets, but they did have experience getting under the skin of men in power: Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show and founder of Lady Parts Justice, was already settled in the office conference room, while Margaret Cho, comedian and singer-songwriter, was on the line from her home in Los Angeles where she was on a break from her “Fresh Off The Bloat” tour. The unlikely collaborators all wound up in one place on October 20: New York’s Town Hall for the second annual Golden Probe Awards, the satirical awards show that skewers legislators trying to restrict reproductive rights. Winstead created the awards; Cho hosted; Daniels was the most titillating guest of honor at the event, which will be streamed on Sunday, October 28 (find a watch party near you).

Daniels has won many awards—almost 30—for her directing and acting work in adult films, but this was her first show in the name of women’s reproductive rights, and she was a presenter rather than a receiver. “I was like, ‘Fuck yes!’” Daniels recalled about being asked to participate. “I’m very excited about anything that says ‘probe.’ But that’s just a conditioned response from my job, so I apologize.”

Lizz Winstead backstage.

By Zach D Roberts.

Daniels reached name-recognition fame outside porn in March when she filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump. She was attempting to void a non-disclosure agreement she signed in 2016, in which she was paid $130,000 by Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen to not speak about her alleged affair with Trump. (Trump has acknowledged the payment and denied the affair.) Since her 60 Minutes interview—watched by twice the number of people as Trump’s recent sit-down on the show—Daniels has been busy: traveling internationally for interviews and appearances, going on the road with her national strip-club tour, promoting her book, and checking the president of the United States of America when he calls her “horseface” on Twitter. (And it’s her every time. “No one else even has the password, so if I drop dead, no one can even get in.”)

Unlike her equally press-friendly lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who seems to be harboring serious political ambitions, or most of Trump’s famous opponents, Daniels has handled the entire thing with quick witticisms and an “I’m rubber, you’re glue” attitude toward insults that can, in many ways, mirror her famous foe’s. Rudy Giuliani went out there and said she didn’t deserve respect because she’s a porn star. She neutralized it with a shrug. “This is the shit I love so much, because it’s like what’s your point?” she told me. “What is your actual point? I know. I’m not hiding it.”

In a post-third-wave feminist era, it is entirely possible for a porn star to be a feminist hero—but Daniels is not interested in being one. She does not identify as a feminist, and has insisted that her consensual alleged affair with Trump has no place in the #MeToo conversation. But at the same time, she’s found common cause with Winstead and Cho, half of whom she met for the first time that day in September. They’re radical feminists and longtime friends who came up together in the San Francisco comedy scene in the late 80s. Winstead’s work with Lady Parts Justice, which she founded in 2012, has included everything from fixing up abortion clinics to this summer’s “Vagical Mystery Tour” with activism-minded comedians. In 2015, Cho wrote a song called “I Want to Kill My Rapist.” “Throughout my life, if you ever spoke up about this kind of stuff [assault and harassment], it was a career-ending move,” Cho said about her activism, after an extended riff about Louis C.K. “There was this complicity that silenced, that had to be adhered to.”

And the two comics saw something in Daniels. Speaking directly to her, Winstead said, “When I just read your story and followed you, it was like, I don’t know what you need, if anything, but I want you to know that no one’s going to leave you hanging. Because that sucks when you come forward, and you’re out there, and you did it, and then you’re like— .”

“Where did everyone go?” Daniels finished.

“I’m not particularly interested in the minutiae of your case. I’m not. I’m interested in the fact that you’re this really fun, cool person who represents things I believe in, and you should be showcased for being strong and amazing,” Winstead added.

As Daniels has said before, she feels both embraced by the feminist community and alarmed by it, both appreciative of the support and guarded. “I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, how can I make myself more appealing to women or feminists?’ It wasn’t on my radar, so that was not my motivation,” she said. “But, yes, hugely embraced, and it’s both very surprising—just the extent of it—and very humbling.”

At one point, Daniels even felt feminists were trying to “hijack” her story as a means to their ends, at the expense of hers. “I was so vocal about this not being a ‘Me Too’ thing. Like don’t put me in your box. First of all, that’s not what happened,” she said. “My whole thing was about being bullied, and now I have actual feminists, in a way, trying to bully me into their own things. But that’s stopped, because I’ve been very vocal: ‘you will not do this.’ But, most importantly, when you start trying to shove my story into that, when it’s plainly not that, you’re discrediting all these victims.”

In the great dodgeball game of advocacy work, Daniels is refusing to be picked for a side. But the Probes are about radical feminist satire dedicated to shaming the country’s most dangerous, if bumbling, foes of women’s reproductive rights at a state and local level. Daniels, as a perpetual thorn in the side of a president who just made it possible for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, was an ally there by default. The Golden Probes are “sexism’s most glamorous night” and “misogyny’s highest honor,” per the taglines, and during Saturday’s show, Daniels stood alongside activists like Therese Patricia Okoumou, the Statue of Liberty scaler, and sex columnist Dan Savage. She stood alongside actor-activists like Michelle Buteau, Taylor Schilling, and Sandra Bernhard, who were giving out awards titled “Best Acting Like You Care About Women in a Non-Supportive Role” and “Best Adaptation of Reality.” For one moment in 2018, just before the midterms, this was a happy crossover event in the women’s-rights universe.

Natasha Lyonne, Taylor Schilling and Jessica Pimentel.

By Megan Cameron.

Daniels believes in what the Probes are trying to do. She thinks that jokes are a way for the bold and activist-minded to meet others in the middle on issues like these. “There’s people who are very outspoken, very feminist, and very involved, and have no shame, and then you have another whole group of people who are kind of on the fence because to talk about something in real, harsh, cold terms freaks them the fuck out. And that’s O.K.,” she said.

“Politics are hard right now,” Winstead said by way of partial agreement. “Being somebody who’s done this shit for—I don’t know—ever, and to try to yank people into thinking that political satire was good and funny, and they’re like, ‘I don’t care about politics.’ I was like, ‘I wish you would.’”

“Thank God this monster created an environment where people give a shit about politics and they can examine further where the oppression is happening,” she continued. “They start with what happened in that election and ‘oh my God, this shit’s crazy.’ But then it’s like, do you know what your local dude is doing? Because that guy really sucks, and he has a ton of power over you.”

By teaming up with radical feminists, even if she doesn’t agree with them on all points, could Daniels make room for other non-feminists to find their way to this common cause? The ones who don’t love what Trump is up to, but have no interest in parsing the academic complexities of gender studies? She’s just one person, and an extremely complicated public figure, so it’s hard to say. But she’s wry and savvy and authoritative—a lot like Winstead and Cho. The Probes, to Daniels, are “a good way to kind of help some of those people who aren’t really comfortable having a very serious conversation.” And those people are midterm voters, too.